TechED Pune got over yesterday evening on a strong note after a great start at Delhi on 5th. The universal feedback has been that this year's TechEd is much better than last year's, with deeper content, better speakers and better logistics. You know, it is not easy pulling off an event as large as TechEd - takes months of planning, preparation and some really strong execution. And to do it back to back, six times ... daunting is a mild word. But this sort of feedback makes it worth all the effort.
As usual, it is the Dev Tools track that has drawn the biggest crowds - Jani is a picture of happiness :-) He owns the track and is responsible for all the great content you see on the track! Dev Tools is followed by Architecture, followed by Data - the two tracks that I own. And yes, I am a picture of happiness too ... thanks to the terrific speakers who have put in some amazing effort to come up with great content. You guys rock!
Rocking reminds me of Gaurav - the resident rock-star of the DPE team. This year we have a graffiti board at TechEd for folks to voice their opinion and this travels from city to city. As expected, this is plastered with complimentary remarks about Gaurav's sessions. Having seen the kind of effort this man puts into preparing his sessions, this is the least he deserves. Way to go dude! I've been doing the Demo Shootout with him at the end of day one and it is great fun. One of the cool demos Gaurav does during the shootout has him sharing his phone number with the audience .... and I am sure that a lot of people have noted that down and he should be receving the first of the support phone calls soon :-) Actually they may not be just support phone calls - he has a huge fan-following with the ladies. Subhashini, watch out! ;-)
My Threat Modeling talk has been appreciated too and the feedback I have received in Pune is to do a full fledged demo and create a real threat model. The reason I have not done it yet is paucity of time - not quite possible to both explain the concept and demo it in a 75-min slot. But am gonna give it a shot and will work on a demo tonight. Another session that seems to be attracting people in hordes is the Hacker-Proofing session. What makes me really happy is that a subject that has been typically boring for folks is now finding such huge relevance. Even if one person / city was to actually start applying the concepts discussed in the session to real-life code, this whole exercise would be worth it. My Secure Services talk has been slightly disappointing though. Most folks haven't yet tried out WCF (or Web Services for that matter) and the second half of the talk focusses on the security model in WCF, so it is hard to explain the security model. Manni, one of my close friends who works at Sapient, attended this talk and suggested that I take an example and walk it thru the session. I couldn't find time to do so at Pune, but will incorporate his suggestion for Mumbai.
The Product Roadmap session that Jani and I are doing on the Architecture track was covered by CIOL and they carried a story. We didn't know that the press was present and it was a pleasant surprise to see such positive coverage. All thanks to Jani who articulated the WinFX vision with great eloquence. We could only do the Dev Platform part and could not get to the Collab suite and the OS / Servers part. May be we should do this session in two parts to cover the whole story. Am gonna ask the logistics guys if we can actually do that.
What else? Yeah, the data track has been really rocking with the sessions on SQL internals, Perf Tuning, Monitoring and LINQ having no seating space and people spilling over into the corridor. Big thanks to all the speakers on the Data track ... one could not ask for more dedicated folks.
Amidst all this excitement and the fun that follows in the evening when all of us get together, the only thing I miss is family. I moved from Delhi to Bangalore a month back and it was hard leaving folks behind. I was hoping to catch up while in Delhi but the packed agenda meant that we could spend very little time together. And now I am on the road and would perhaps be going back to Delhi only after a couple of months, if that. Chikki all along has been a pillar of support and I am really amazed at her putting up so well over the last few months of crankiness and long periods of absence. You are the rockstar of my life baby!
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